What If The Copier Were Never Invented?

"Technology doesn't evolve steadily and continuously," David Owen asserts in the middle of his new book, "Copies in Seconds," the tale of Chester Carlson's quest to create the Xerox copier.

The rest of the book proves that statement in spades -- offering an engrossing look at how a humble but brilliant inventor overcame enormous obstacles to revolutionize communications.

And it's hardly a stretch to consider the Xerox copier -- or, more precisely, the copying method known as xerography -- a communications breakthrough in the same league with, say, Gutenberg's press, Bell's telephone or the World Wide Web.

But the copier's very utility and ubiquity might make it difficult to remember a world before it was easy to make copies on plain paper.

Think back, if you can, to the days when a small number of copies were made with carbon paper or not at all. If you needed more than a handful of copies, then expensive, smelly and imperfect alternatives, like the mimeograph, were your only options.

But in 1937, Chester Carlson, the son of an impoverished barber, working and studying alone, came up with a startling new approach to the problem of producing multiple copies without damaging the original.

For the next quarter-century, Carlson would pursue his vision, hiring freelance scientists, working with independent research foundations and, finally, collaborating with the Haloid Co. of Rochester, N.Y., which would become famous as Xerox Corp.

What sets Carlson apart from many of the world's other inventors is that he didn't so much stand on the shoulders of giants as leap from them. Had he not conceived of xerography, the plain paper copier might have remained un-invented for decades.

Indeed, Carlson's approach to copying was so innovative that scientists who later reviewed the patents didn't understand how it worked. The book also recounts how IBM repeatedly fumbled offers to get in early on xerography technology, a blunder that must seem excruciating in light of the copier's later success.

The story of any technology is ultimately the story of the people who imagined it, who chased and who made it happen. Owen, a staff writer for The New Yorker, brings Carlson's story to life with charm, insight, compassion and a gentle sense of humor. *